My Lifehouse
A few years ago I was inspired by the work of Pete Townshend to take certain elements of his Lifehouse story and write a treatment of my own from the perspective of an undeveloped character. The following is my treatement.
A Story
I'm such an asshole. And even realizing it won't do anything to change the fact. So be it.
Maybe you want to hear a story. Maybe you don't. Fuck if I know. But it still makes me laugh that I'm the one left to tell it. So what the hell.
There's something you should know about stories though. They're all neat little packages. Packages that begin somewhere and end somewhere else. To tell them, we distort reality to fit the events into this ellipse, this neat little package. We like stories because they make us relevant and immortal.
Reality, on the other hand, is no neat little package. It's just a billion or so little lives knotted together in a cacophony of events. It makes no sense and has no higher purpose. Your epitaph is your coda, the end of your song.
OK, now I'm getting ahead of the story. Let me back up.
Ray grew potatoes. And he didn't do a very good job of it either. Not that you could blame him. It wasn't like in the before time when farmers made a living by reaping nature's energy. Nature had become an abomination by the time Ray got into it. And somehow he blamed me for it.
Wasn't my fault. Nothing in Ray's sorry little life was. But like I said, I'm an asshole. Assholes are realists. Or vice versa. Whatever. Back to Ray.
Ray used to work for me. We were in the "media" business. I still am. And Ray? He was good and he was dangerous. Because he got it. That's why I hired him. And it's also why he left. What did we do in the "media" business? We created lives for people. Lives they could be proud of. Lives that they looked back on from their deathbed and thought that it had all been worth it. Not such a bad calling if I do say so myself.
It was an idea born out of the old shows people would watch on telly in the before time. Of course back then, you could still turn it off, go outside and work the muscles. Breathe the air. Collect the mail. People weren't afraid of exposure.
That's when I was just starting out. That's when it all started to get worse. Everything. The pollution. The sun. The water. The zealots. Living. For the first time in human history it started to dawn on a few people, myself included, that it wasn't going to get better. Ever. This was the beginning of the end for religion too.
But I had an idea. Something to make this mistake of an existence bearable. Memory. I would keep the memory of life in the before time alive. So I gathered up the writers, poets and artists and paid them to sit at terminals to put it all down. The sights, smells, triumphs, heart breaks, loves and naivetes of a future filled with promise. We would capture it all, package it, and send it out in nice neat little packages onto the grid and straight into people's homes, into their experience suits. The "experience suit" – what genius that little invention was.
Without it, homes were prisons. With it, the home was a womb.
This was our little revolution against the dark future. Our little band of cohorts were going to save humanity from itself. Ray's first revolution.
God it was an amazing time. We had attempted to manufacture hope and I think we were succeeding. But this is a story isn't it? Wouldn't be a story without conflict would it? That arrived in the form of music. Of all the things that could have ignited Ray's passion, it had to be something as mundane as the little harmonies and melodies people tap their feet to. Even today, I shake my head in wonder. The counter-revolution of noise. Go figure.
I don't hate music. I think it’s a fine thing. But it's just notes on a scale. In fact it was my idea to use music to make the experiences even more enriching. I created soundtracks for their little trips. And that's where Ray flipped on me.
"Leave it alone," he'd say. "Don't mess with the music. It's not right."
"But they love it," I'd say.
"You can't just put it in their heads. They have no control. There's no relationship. That's not their music. Let them create their own."
"Create their own? What the hell are you talking about? It's just music."
"You conceited prick! It's never just music. It's communion. "
I was lost on it. His house of cards came tumbling down after that. There was nothing I could do to save him. He grew tired of fighting me. He grew tired of living in his head. He grew tired of the new reality. So he took Sally and the kids and got as far away as he could imagine. Away from the city, past the slag heaps of the hinterlands and off to Scotland to grow a family… and potatoes.
Meanwhile my star kept rising. Athena took Ray's place. And I have no regrets, she was a hungry one. After a while, people couldn't get enough of the grid. Ironic really. The harder we worked the lazier people got. Reality is what you make of it, right?
So now Ray hated me. And he wasn't the only one. This music thing started to grow. It started with the kids on the fringe. From the lower classes without the higher levels of access to the Grid. Musos they called themselves. They started making their own music. And I admit I got greedy. This soundtrack with your experience thing had made experiences better than they were in the before time. It was my hook. I had to control the music. So I did. I didn't ask, I just took it and made it all my own. The memory cracks me up. I owned "music." All of it.
Some things just really piss people off though. These Musos really took their little ditties seriously. What a trifle. It was nothing personal. It's just business.
So where am I? Oh, Ray's in Scotland rooting around in the ash for measly potatoes. Athena and I are in London keeping the world happy. And the Musos are high in the hinterlands around jug band campfires. Then the hackers come.
Bobby, Spinner, those little bastards. They hacked into my Grid and started all this drivel about a "Lifehouse." What the fuck? Something about the music of people's hearts and finding the truth on a treble clef or some shit like that.
What a nuisance. A big live event. People were just supposed to get out of their experience suits and come on down to the show. Some band is gonna play songs that everyone helps create. A democracy of noise. Music of people's hearts my ass. I've heard this band. The bassist had some skill. But when the singer wasn't roaring testosterone into his microphone, he'd swing it around like some blind cowboy trying to swat at flies with a rope. The guitarist would splatter blood from his knuckles as he slammed them into his strings. Then he and the drummer, a typhoon with sticks, would smash their instruments and get a big "Yaaaa!" from the crowd. I always assumed it was because they were so pissed off to be so bad. But the Musos ate it up. And they thought my experiences were shallow.
And now all these pissed off, stoned Musos are going to clamor into a great hall with the innocents they recruit and what? Sing with the band about what they think is important musically? Find salvation through the note of their heart? Please.
Well Ray's world wasn’t totally immune to the insanity. His teenage daughter, Mary, hadn't fallen too far from the tree. She had actually run off with the Musos. Ray and Sally were having a devil of time trying to find her. But when Ray heard these rants on his grid box, he knew where she'd end up. Where he wanted to be. Time to return to the cess pool. That's when he grabbed Sally and the rest of the family and hit the road caravanning it back to London.
Things had changed since he'd been gone. He didn't know about all the camps the Musos set up in the hinterlands. But he learned the first night when they stopped to camp. It wasn’t just him. There was something happening all right. Like a relay of love and anger. They were going to revolt. What a laugh.
Meanwhile, I'm minding the store and thinking about what all this means for my customers. It wasn’t a safe world. These people hadn't been out in a long time. And now all of them were going to come out for the first time into this kind of environment? It just wasn't good for the general welfare. I had to stop it.
A lot of people thought I opposed the Lifehouse because it threatened my hold on the cultural conscience. It was a flattering thought. But it wasn't entirely true. This kind of thinking could be dangerous.
When Ray got to town in all his furor, he hunted me down and confronted me with this twisted logic. He told me how people were waking up to the fact that what they got off the grid wasn't the way things really happened. He blamed me for the lost sense of purpose he saw in people's eyes. I told him we weren't that much different, he and I. The only difference was that he had hope, I didn't. I asked him to come back and help me channel his hope for people and we could offer it to them together.
"Remember our little revolution?" I asked.
He stared right into my eyes for what seemed like an eternity. He was at a fork in the road. Maybe I would really listen this time. I didn't know what I was thinking. I just wanted all this Lifehouse stuff to go away. I must have blinked. That set him off. This was the real revolution he said. The revolution of the one note. Where the music frees the consciousness, not some damned program fed though a tube. He said I'd fooled him once. But never again. Then he was gone. Off to reunite his family under the big top.
Alone, for the first time I was scared. I don't know why. He frightened me. One note? What the hell is that? All I had done was try to make the best of an uncontrollable situation. But now Ray and all the others blamed me. I was the bad guy. They didn't know. They just didn't know how I had buried the rage and found a way out. It was for them. This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
I didn't have any friends. I had power. Some people think that when you ascend to power, you loose touch with the truth. Bullshit. You rise up to get away from the truth. To protect yourself from it. I bloody well knew what it was going on. Why do you think I was running so fast the other way? I let Athena and her minions protect me from the despair. When my fist clenched, they'd crack it open.
I tuned in to my own grid box. And I heard talk about vibrations and music and consciousness. And then a song. One I didn't own. About one note, pure and easy. I tried so hard, I really did. But it just didn't make any sense to me. Lifehouse? Shit, I had a show to stop.
I summoned the authorities and waited outside. God it was loud. But not hold your ears loud. It shook your chest as if you were sitting right inside the kick drum of that maniac on stage.
So this was the music of people's hearts. Fuck 'em.
I had to wait for protection. I wasn't a popular person here. I could hear things moving into a crescendo pitch. The vibrations coming out of that hall were… they were… words can't describe it. Then a noise, maybe it was a note, I don't know. Then silence. All silence. By the time we rushed in, there wasn't a soul in the hall. I mean it was bleeding empty. And silent. And over. Really over. Was it a dream? An illusion? A parlor trick? Nothing but silence. Heaven help them now.
Right in the center the hall, these two disks. All that was left. The music of people's hearts? I doubt it. But I'm not going to end up where they are, wherever that is. And so, I went back to my life.
I suppose you want to know what happened after that? Well aren't you a lazy prick. If you're reading this, the answer is all around you. Don't look to me to justify anything anymore. Either you like it or you don't. What you do about it is your fault.
-Jumbo
